"Still Bleeding"

They found him hunched in the steaming bath,
ink staining the surface like blood’s rehearsal,
his voice still echoing down stone corridors—
a voice not for song, but flint.
Even his pulse wrote pamphlets.

He died not once, but
in verses draped across salon walls,
in paintings that turned martyr into marble,
into myth—but he lived as a nerve unshut.

And now? We are the heirs of flooded inboxes,
the revolution reduced to a push notification.
But we, too, sit soaking
in the lukewarm waters of exhausted hope,
dreaming of clean slates while the ceiling leaks indignity.

What use is a quill now, Marat?
They click and scroll, skim and forget.
Would you shout into the algorithm?
Would your lists survive the purge?

Yet— still I see you, in subway glares,
in climate petitions signed with trembling thumbs,
in the voice that cracks at town halls and still speaks anyway.

You are not dead.
You’ve become the heat
in every whisper that aches to be scream,
every dream punched into a keyboard at 2:47 a.m.,
between despair and tomorrow.

We bathe, yes— but with eyes
open for the next knock,
the next Charlotte hiding behind cause.

And when we rise, wrinkled but willing,
we take your pen—not as weapon,
but as wound, as reminder, as promise:
The page is not done with us yet.